The best grunge song that didn’t come from Seattle
The story of grunge is forever going to be tied to the Pacific Northwest.
Any kind of music usually finds its way to spread out to other parts of the world, but even disco moved beyond New York, and reggae moved outside of Jamaica. There were a lot more questions whenever a band started to make sludgy rock and roll if they weren’t based in Seattle. There were a lot more grunge purists out there than everyone thought, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t some great alt-rock bands in other parts of the world.
Granted, the word ‘grunge’ did always have a caveat next to it as well. That word might have been coined by a bunch of musos looking for a name for this kind of music, but it’s hard to think of any of the Seattle bands sounding exactly alike. Nirvana was basically a punk band, Alice in Chains were an alternative metal band in many respects, and had they not adopted flannel shirts, there’s a good chance that Pearl Jam would have been lumped in with every other great classic rock outfit from around that time.
But if it was all about where you came from, it wasn’t hard to see why a band like Stone Temple Pilots became a punching bag really quick. They were coming from the sunny streets of California, and since the rest of the world had been trying to distance itself from the hair metal movement, seeing a California band springing up with a song like ‘Plush’ around that same time made them look like the most manufactured rock and roll outfit of all time.
Admittedly, Core is a pretty solid album with a lot of great classic rock worship, but Purple was going to be what everyone was paying attention to. The band either needed to find some more originality or go the hell away, but it’s not like they suddenly changed overnight. Their transition was a bit more subtle, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t beat the other grunge bands at their own game.
Scott Weiland never claimed to be the same disaffected rock star that Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder was, but when he and the rest of the band hit on ‘Interstate Love Song’, they walked away with the greatest grunge song that Seattle never made. All the tropes of the alt-rock revolution were still there, but there was a lot more sunshine to the song than what everyone else was doing.
Because if you really think about grunge, a lot of it sounds like music that you hear when it’s raining 24 hours a day, and people are crammed in their basements. It’s not exactly fun music every single time it comes on, but ‘Interstate Love Song’ took all of those trappings and turned it into a song that had the same attitude as a grunge anthem but with the sound of an AOR rock band from years before. It wasn’t going to earn them hipster points, but if this came on a few decades earlier, it wouldn’t have felt out of place next to Eagles.
And it’s helpful that the band caught the exact pocket of time where this kind of song could have worked. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were in between releases at the time, and given that the more artificial rock and roll outfits like Bush hadn’t really come in yet, STP were able to walk away with their dignity once they started to switch their sound towards a more glammy, garage-rock angle on Tiny Music and No. 4.
So while countless artists have tried to make their musical legacy out of following trends, ‘Interstate Love Song’ is what happens when a band manages to play to their strengths after hitting the big time. They were bound to be called poseurs for the rest of their lives, but even if they had more than a few flaws, no one was going to be able to take ‘Interstate Love Song’ away from them.
